I have a pottery friend who hand builds these fanciful creatures from coil pots or slabs. Each week when I visit the pottery studio she has fashioned a new creature out of clay. I have watched her create alpacas, dodo birds, chickens, dragons, fish and all sorts of jars and vessels. I have wanted to work on some collaborating for some time and suggested we try our hand at Exquisite Corpse. This is an exercise that the surrealist artists would practice and always fascinated me. Each artist would work on one part of a body, not knowing what the other artist was doing. So this spring, just at the onset of the pandemic we implemented our plan. She handed off a few bodies and I sent her a couple of heads. I got to work on creating a few heads for her bodies and fired and glazed them in my kiln. Here are two that I completed last week..
Where do my ideas come from?
People ask me how long it takes to create a piece and where do my ideas come from. So I decided to share the design and execution of a recent piece. While writing my morning pages ( an exercise I learned from Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way) the idea of the vintage coin operated kiddie rides popped into my mind. I remember as a child riding on them when shopping with my mom. My favorite was always the horses, but I have ridden in cars and rocket ships. I love the work of Mike Cinelli and have tried out his technique on a few pieces in the past. This time I decided to make a larger piece that would need to be constructed in several stages, requiring planning and rest time for the clay. So here is my Space Patrol rocket ship, birth and development.
I begin by fashioning the nosecone from a slab of clay that I turn into a cylinder, then slowly paddle to close the top into a cone shape.
I sculpt the figure and make the back section of the rocket. Each time I sculpt a new section I have to let the clay rest to firm up a bit, this ensures stronger bonds when I begin to put pieces together.
These are the little rivets that try to capture the amazing Mike Cinelli”s style.
The final underglaze wash will highlight these details.
Here is the piece waiting for bisque firing. The base has been painted with colored slip and I hand lettered the base hoping it has a weathered, retro look.
Spring Alpaca Shearing and Studio Photo Shoot
The weather stayed cool this spring but by mid may the alpacas were ready for shearing. The clipping crew arrived on a rainy Tuesday morning and were all done by 1:00. The ‘girls’ were all out rolling around in their dirt patches enjoying fur freedom.
I’ve been spending more time in the studio since closing the gallery and planning for fall art fairs. Needing some good photos for publicity and my website I enlisted the talented Rebecca Gerrard from Full Circle Creative Works to shoot me. She spent a sunny afternoon with me and we had a bunch of fun. She made my ‘guys’ look first class.
The new kiln has arrived
The new kiln has arrived! My very first, so the trial and error has begun. Have done the test fire, then a bisque fire, to cone 04. My first glaze firing to cone 4 resulted in a great batch of very light colors…